British American Tobacco’s chief government mentioned efforts to offload its Russian enterprise to a neighborhood companion may spill into 2024, underlining the difficulties that corporations face as they search to exit the nation.

The proprietor of Fortunate Strike and Dunhill manufacturers mentioned it was in “superior discussions” to finish the sale in 2023, virtually a yr after it first promised to exit the nation following the invasion of Ukraine.

However chief government Jack Bowles admitted that he couldn’t assure that the switch can be concluded by the tip of the yr. “As I don’t have a crystal ball, I can’t be absolute on that one, however the goal is actually to do it . . . We wish to exit in 2023,” he instructed the Monetary Occasions.

Bowles instructed traders that the cigarette maker was “working as rapidly as potential to switch the companies in compliance with worldwide and native legal guidelines”.

He added on Thursday that the talks with a “native joint administration distributor consortium” — understood to be Russia’s SNS Group of Firms, which has labored with BAT since 1993 — had been continuing “with a view to finishing the switch in 2023”.

Russia had traditionally been recognized as a key progress market by BAT and different large tobacco corporations due to its excessive smoking charges and customers’ openness to changing to new-generation tobacco merchandise, corresponding to BAT’s Vuse vaping gadgets.

In 2021, Russia and Belarus accounted for 3.1 per cent of BAT group revenues and a pair of.4 per cent of adjusted earnings. The corporate additionally plans to exit Belarus as a part of any deal.

BAT declined to say whether or not it was in search of to insert a buyback clause for its Russian operations in case the warfare ended, as Danish brewer Carlsberg admitted to this month. “These are issues that we can’t talk about as a result of we’re not even finalised when it comes to the deal,” Bowles mentioned.

He pressured that he did “not maintain the keys of the puzzle” to getting the “extraordinarily complicated” deal over the road, which is sophisticated by sanctions regimes within the US and Europe.

Of the most important tobacco conglomerates, to date solely Imperial Manufacturers, maker of Gauloises and Davidoff cigarettes, has exited Russia, taking a £463mn hit to earnings.

Marlboro maker Philip Morris Worldwide has introduced plans to depart Russia however has but to take action, whereas Japan Tobacco, which had a 40 per cent market share within the territory, has suspended new investments however didn’t pledge to depart.

BAT has written down the worth of its Russian and Belarusian enterprise by £554mn as a part of an impairment cost in its firm filings, however nonetheless valued its property held on the market within the two nations at £752mn.

In its full-year outcomes on Thursday, BAT reported a 2.3 per cent rise in revenues to £27bn and a 4.3 per cent uptick in working earnings to £12.4bn on a continuing foreign money foundation in 2022, in contrast with the yr earlier than.

BAT mentioned revenues at its vaping and heated tobacco enterprise grew 37 per cent to £2.8bn, including that it now anticipated its new-generation merchandise portfolio, which incorporates Vuse vapes and glo heated tobacco sticks, to develop into worthwhile a yr sooner than deliberate in 2024.

Shares within the London-listed group had been down practically 5 per cent to £29.42 in early morning buying and selling.

Rae Maile, an analyst at Panmure Gordon, described BAT’s determination to not launch a contemporary share buyback programme to reward shareholders as “at greatest unusual, at worst disconcerting”.